One of seven posts about collaboration and why it nearly always fails to deliver results, inspired by Morten T Hansen's Collaboration.
The quality of the teacher is the number one factor in the improvement of an education system, collaboration is the key factor in improving the quality of that teacher.
Collaboration helps increase academic success, yet most collaboration doesn't work. Here is one of Morten T. Hansen's six key reasons for collaboration failures:
Implementing the Wrong Solution
Following on from misdiagnoses, is finding the wrong solution. Learning Management Systems, as described earlier, were the wrong solution to the wrong problem. IT managers were convinced that some IT, instead of some psychology, would help solve the problem of teachers not sharing their work and ideas.
The same's true of those trying to 'protect' young people by not allowing them or encouraging them to post to the open world wide web: the problem is not so much internet predators as the lack of media literacy skills to not put oneself at risk online. The right solution here is not internet filtering or setting school blog platform defaults to 'private', but to set school blog defaults to 'public' and initiate a superb media literacy programme for every student, parent and teacher.
Morten T Hansen's answer is that we need disciplined collaboration, where leaders i) evaluate what opportunities there are for collaboration (where an upside will be created), ii) spot the barriers to collaboration (not-invented-here, unwillingness to help and preference to hoard one's ideas, inability to seek out ideas, and an unwillingness to collaborate with people we don't know very well).
Picture from Noel C
One of seven posts about collaboration and why it nearly always fails to deliver results, inspired by Morten T Hansen's Collaboration.
The quality of the teacher is the number one factor in the improvement of an education system, collaboration is the key factor in improving the quality of that teacher.
Collaboration helps increase academic success, yet most collaboration doesn't work. Here is one of Morten T. Hansen's six key reasons for collaboration failures:
Misdiagnosing the problem
How many schools do we know where leaders want to share good practice between staff but don't know where it is, when the real problem is that people are unwilling to share their good bits of practice?
National resource- and idea-sharing platforms, 'owned' by a Government or commercial organisation, have consistently failed to bring the majority of educators to their doors as the problem they have identified - people don't have anywhere to share - is a misdiagnosis.
The problem, for large numbers of educators, is that they are unwilling to share no matter who, what or where the platform is.
Once you know that this is the problem, one can begin to work out with those people what kinds of environment might encourage them to change their behaviour.
Pic from Mark
One of seven posts about collaboration and why it nearly always fails to deliver results, inspired by Morten T Hansen's Collaboration.
The quality of the teacher is the number one factor in the improvement of an education system, collaboration is the key factor in improving the quality of that teacher.
Collaboration helps increase academic success, yet most collaboration doesn't work. Here is one of Morten T. Hansen's six key reasons for collaboration failures:
Underestimating the costs
There are environments where people are under the impression that others are just out for their own gain. There is a distrust of “helping the other side”.
Schools might find this in several forms: parents who don't want their children to be in mixed ability classes, where students can help improve each other's capacities; teachers who don't want to share their resources, in case it ends up becoming an ever descending spiral to the lowest quality demoninator in their department or school; students who don't want to share their ideas for a project, lest they "give away their ideas" and let another student gain just as good or better a grade.
Generally, the costs of collaboration are always there, subconsciously or explicitly. The leader's job is working out how much those costs represent for the actors in a potential collaboration, how much the collaboration is likely to bring to them and see whether there is a mental profit leftover for each collaborator. If not, then the costs may be too great, the perception being that collaboration will only go to "help the other side" (and somehow take away from me).
Picture by epSos.de
One of seven posts about collaboration and why it nearly always fails to deliver results, inspired by Morten T Hansen's Collaboration.
The quality of the teacher is the number one factor in the improvement of an education system, collaboration is the key factor in improving the quality of that teacher.
Collaboration helps increase academic success, yet most collaboration doesn't work. Here is one of Morten T. Hansen's six key reasons for collaboration failures:
Overshooting the potential value
Sony again made a collaboration slip-up when they went to collaborate with Columbia Pictures in 1989, the idea being that filmmaking and film delivery could be brought together in interesting ways. The problem arises when the films are no good, and any synergy is rendered useless: "Synergy: big wind, loud thunder, no rain." (as cited in Deals from Hell).
When I'm working with startups in a Business Model Generation workshop, inspired by the book of the same name, one of the challenges for them is seeing between who is a potential paying customer and who is a worthwhile partner. The key in partnership is in the name: it should be considered a lifetime commitment, and a partner can never be converted into a client at a later date. Clients are what businesses need, in order to gain results.
In the creative industries, there is yet further questioning of the value of collaboration. The best films (and definitely the easiest filmsets to work on) have one director who just directs. He or she tells people what it is they want. There might be some room for negotiation, or for a "why don't we try it this way", but by and large the director knows what they want and they don't so much collaborate during the shoot as get the thing done before sundown.
I wish it was as easy as that, though. Collaboration is often better than a lone genius going about their art. Gordon Torr spends an entertaining 288 pages struggling between creative examples of where the lone genius has won the day, and creative teams where synergy was the only way to success in Managing Creative People. He never does reach a conclusion, although he does point out that job titles and hierarchy are a key killer of creative potential, something that relates to how collaboration's costs can oft be misunderstood (my next post)...
In an education context, to gain results in the literal or pure learning sense, we need to know who and what resources constitute 'clients', from whom we'll get stuff to enrich our minds, and who we want to view as collaborative partners because the sum of those parts will be greater than the individuals themselves. It's not a given that two people collaborating will offer this secret sauce, so we have to think very carefully about with whom we collaborate, what we get out of it, what they get out of it and the potential for both parties to get something new out of the partnership and collaboration.
Never again should the words "get into some groups" or "partner up" be uttered without some thought by the students, and by their teacher, about who is going to offer whom a genuinely additive partnership for a collaboration.
Pic of the deadly Baguio Airport by Storm Crypt
One of seven posts about collaboration and why it nearly always fails to deliver results, inspired by Morten T Hansen's Collaboration.
The quality of the teacher is the number one factor in the improvement of an education system, collaboration is the key factor in improving the quality of that teacher.
Collaboration helps increase academic success, yet most collaboration doesn't work. Here is one of Morten T. Hansen's six key reasons for collaboration failures:
Overcollaboration
BP fell into the trap of having the emergence of far more networks and subgroups than were strictly necessary to get a result. There was a period where there was “always a good reason for meeting”.
Through social media, particularly in education, it can feel that there are just too many places to go, too many hashtags to follow, too many LinkedIn Groups and Nings to join in order to get some strong, actionable learning out of them.
The result of this over-collaboration can often be disastrous for the student publishing their work or seeking someone to collaborate with - "it's just another student blog", "it's just another wiki of debatable quality" might be the thoughts running through the minds of teachers and students elsewhere when the initial callout for peer support and comments goes out.
Even if comments are made, are they genuinely helpful in the way that structured, framed formative assessment can be within the walls of a classroom, or are they perfunctory "well dones", a digital kiss on the cheek before moving onto the next request?
Photo from B Prosser
One of seven posts about collaboration and why it nearly always fails to deliver results, inspired by Morten T Hansen's Collaboration.
The quality of the teacher is the number one factor in the improvement of an education system, collaboration is the key factor in improving the quality of that teacher.
Collaboration helps increase academic success, yet most collaboration doesn't work. Here is one of Morten T. Hansen's six key reasons for collaboration failures:
Collaborating in hostile territory
Sony was a company that took pride in its decentralised specialist divisions, divisions whose pride led to them competing against each other. When five divisions were asked to collaborate to create a new music behemoth, Sony Connect, the result was disastrous.
The personal computer division based in Tokyo, the portable audio team behind the Walkman, the flash memory player team, Sony Music in the US and Sony Music back in Japan just couldn't work together, so strong was their competition. The PC and Walkman groups released their own competing portable music players, and the Music and other electronics divisions of the company released three competing music download portals. The US group wanted to use flash memory and the MP3 format. The Japan group wanted to use minidisc and Sony's proprietary ATRAC format for music downloads. By May 2004, a very disconnected Sony Connect finally launched and was taken apart by the media and users.
In the meantime, Apple innovated its narrow, well thought-through line of MP3 player products with no competition worth the name. Apple's divisions had, through Steve Jobs and a culture of unity, collaborated on one perfect player. Sony's interior competition had decimated any chance of creating one dream competitive product.
Competitive units (within an institution) cannot collaborate.
(I've added this note after a great comment, below: competition within an institution breaks collaboration. But competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive. If a leader can unite an organisation in collaboration and turn competitiveness to the outside, then the collaboration will work very well - think: football teams, corporations, or a country of school districts uniting to realise the benefits of scale that come from a nationwide online learning community, rather than letting commercial organisations pick up the financial benefits by uniting to pick off 32 Local Authorities at once.)
So, then, what does this mean for education? In a school there are many competitive units: individual teachers have, traditionally, been the kings or queens of their manor, the closed-door profession meaning that what happens in their classroom, good or bad, is their responsibility. The result can be a competitive one - "my kids", "my class", "my results". Where teachers are recompensed on performance in any way, even in the form of feedback from superiors, this heightens the sense of competitiveness, making collaboration between teachers in a school impossible. The ingredients of competition - closed doors, one-teacher-one-class, rewards and praise for good performance - may have to be dismantled first, before collaboration can be encouraged.
Between schools within a district, a similar competitive nature exists, if not more so, as schools vie for finite resources from one source - the district. Therefore, for a district to enable collaboration between schools yet more ingredients need removed or altered: funding has to be allotted strictly on a per-pupil basis, not on projects or bids, for example.
Update: Peter Hirst points out further examples of school systems removing competition to enable collaboration, notably in Finland:
Thought I'd link you to an article that intrigued me... The main basis is that by removing competition in Finnish schools collaboration thrives and they succeed - there's no private schools, no school league tables, no performance pay and no standardised tests...
It is no surprise, therefore, that international collaborations of the kind that eTwinning encourages might work better for teachers and schools than collaborating closer to home, but the question that now remains, is collaborating for what? If there's nothing to be lost through competition, there is also, perhaps, a perception that there is nothing to be gained. Cue: collaboration for collaboration's sake.
Pic from Andrew Becraft
One of seven posts about collaboration and why it nearly always fails to deliver results, inspired by Morten T Hansen's Collaboration.
The quality of the teacher is the number one factor in the improvement of an education system, collaboration is the key factor in improving the quality of that teacher.
Collaboration helps increase academic success, yet most collaboration doesn't work. The Microsoft-supported ITL Research revealed in a large-scale study:
"Innovative teaching happens more in environments where teachers collaborate. In schools where teachers report more frequent collaboration with one another on teaching practices, innovative teaching scores tend to be higher... Teachers told us that collaboration can be an important mechanism for sharing teaching practices and for mutual support toward improving them."
Anecdotally, this has also been the prime driver in the continued growth and success of the TeachMeet movement since 2006, and EdCamps since then, providing environments in which teachers, for whatever reason, feel comfortable sharing. We'll explore over this series of posts what makes collaboration work sometimes, and fail others.
In education, the ITL Research mentioned earlier offers some light as to how further barriers might be approached.
"If innovative teaching is not yet commonplace, under what climates and conditions does it flourish? For a host of reasons, ecosystems (be they educational or biological) have strikingly different features in different places. Accordingly, we might expect different approaches and conditions to be driving factors in the different parts of the world represented in this research. We report here on factors that emerge as salient across countries, drawing from both survey data and qualitative reports.
Collaboration relies on a supportive culture, alignment of incentives, and times built into teachers’ schedules during which collaboration can take place."
And when John Hattie undertook his study of 800 reviews he found that the most effective teaching practices included a reliance on "the influence of peers, feedback, transparent learning intentions and success criteria... using various strategies, attending to both surface and deep knowing:
In short - the most effective teaching requires the most effective collaboration. The challenge, I believe, is that in education, as in the world of business, many or most collaborations are not effective.
Morten T. Hansen spent years trying to work out why leaders sabotage themselves by promoting more collaboration in their organisation:
"In their eagerness to get people to tear down silos and work in cross-unit teams, leaders often forget that the goal of collaboration is not collaboration in itself, but results. Leaders need to think differently, focusing on what Hansen calls disciplined collaboration."
In Collaboration he examines companies like Hewlett Packard, Proctor & Gamble, Apple and BP to find out how the best teams know when to collaborate, and when not to.
In education, the sign of a bad collaboration might be summed up flippantly with the line: "Oh no, not another wiki…" The web is littered with "collaborations" that may have made the teachers involved feel fluffy and warm, but which added little to the results of the learning process.
Morten T Hansen outlines from his decade of research six key reasons for most collaboration's failure, and over the next six blog posts, we'll explore each one in turn.
Pic from Andrew Wong
It seems customary that on the slow news days of the New Year, teaching unions seek the high profile that will always come from bashing social networks, deeming them dangerous for teachers and threatening teaching professionals with losing their job should they slip up.
After "a number" of social network-related cases brought before the General Teaching Council this year (how many?) the SSTA, the union for Scittish Secondary School Teachers [sic], "believes teachers can reveal too much personal information on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The union also fears they could become overly familiar with pupils."
There's nothing in there that isn't true of teachers who don't use social networks. What about the teachers in my former schools, pre-social-networks, who went for beers with sixth year students of an evening, who undertook privately paid study lessons with them to top up what wasn't happening in class, who revealed their first names and how many kids they have, and what they get up to in the evening...
Saying that I'm popping out to Asda for some frozen pizza on Twitter, or sighing digitally in a status update that I'd had a particularly hard day teaching the 'weans', is nothing new. Sure, the audience is wider. Sure, the potential for being misunderstood is there.
But so is the potential that many more thousands of teachers in Scotland (and millions elsewhere) exploit positively through social networks to develop professional ties where peer-to-peer professional learning can happen. Threatening the vast sensible majority on the basis of a few under-educated teachers is short-sighted.
So, instead of "drawing up new guidelines" (which I'm choosing to misinterpret as quashing the rights of teachers to use social networks at all to talk about work) or making the disproportionate link between a social media slip up and getting fired, whyu don't teaching unions and the GTCS provide more reiteration of the excellent guidance that I helped the EIS, Scotland's biggest teaching union, draw up five years ago, or follow the existing most up-to-date guidance from ACAS? They still make sense, as they have nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the attitudes and comportment of teachers in their public lives.
Update: Louise Jones has just highlighted the Highland Council joint-produced set of guidelines, released in December. We're hardly short of excellent exemplars, are we?
Photo: Chris Devers
One of the schools we're working with has just redesigned its timetables from scratch, based on the energy of the students, and negotiates most of each day with every student at the beginning and middle of the day.
When we're working with our Design Thinking Schools there is one challenge that is guaranteed to come up through the initial empathy and observation phase. It's symptoms are often first cited in great numbers: time, energy, curriculum coverage. We use a period of structured observation of every aspect of the school and a building blocks exercise to discover these issues, to get observations, not just opinions or perceptions:
The problem itself is actually far simpler: the constraint of the timetable.
So, whether it's an independent girls school in Sydney or a family of primary schools in South London, we get them to reimagine what the timetable could look like, based on how energetic and "up for" learning children (and their teachers) are, and on how much time is required to make the most of certain activities.
We discover different surprises in every school. At MLC School, through a colour-coding exercise on everyone's timetables we discovered that both teachers and students were low in energy and thinking capacity for the first couple of hours on a Monday morning, with other low energy levels at the close of the day (and little humour for learning that was foisted upon them, as opposed to learning of which they were in control). No surprise there, really, except the timetable tips an unfair disadvantage on students that have mathematics then, rather than a session of phyiscal education or another practical subject with some movement. Students learn that projects need long tracts of uninterrupted time, but maths needs short, sharp, high energy time to keep concentration levels up. Or, when studying maths at a higher level, students yearn longer sessions on maths to get deep into new concepts, try them out and create something from them that contributes to another project.
At Rosendale School, South London, the teachers there have got around to publishing their two class timetables, clearly showing in light blue the 70% or so of the timetable that is up for negotiation, up for problem-finding and -solving.
This framework was designed with students, in much the same way as we did with high school students at MLC School in Sydney, to spot which parts of the day would lend themselves best to which kind of activity, and which activities were unmoveable, mostly down to visiting specialists needing these times, in the short-term at least.
As always, our brilliant teachers there are sharing their journey on their own blog, so if you want to see how this pans out through early 2012, just give them a regular visit or follow their posterous blog.
Every year that passes, I like to see what my toll on the planet has been in order to make some carbon amends and try to better understand this curious equation: for every year that social networks grow, the amount of travel to see people face-to-face increases. We were all promised something different, I'm sure, but the fact remains that our little business needs to jump on planes to continue to grow:
That means that this year I've had to go around the world just over 5 times. Two of those times were actually around the world, as our growing base of Design Thinking Schools in Australia hits tipping point (more news on that in 2012). But that means the other three times around the world has been spread between a growing desire of Nordic countries to make their high quality learning ever more inspiring, and the beginnings of United States schools seeing that there are ideas elsewhere that might help mend some of the damage done to their system over the past decade.
There have been some inspiring moments this past year, too many to count, but I've particularly enjoyed:
I'd love to say that there will be less travel in 2012, but we've already got three turns around the world booked between here and August, with more UK and European work beginning to develop. The little enterprise I started two years ago has flourished this year, with more excitement to come in 2012 with my not-so-new-now colleague Tom Barrett, and other new faces likely to appear in the New Year.
We're busy to bursting point, and in these times that is a Good Thing.
We're also making an effort in our company to travel with more efficient airlines who run more green aircraft, meaning that despite the extra 22,000 miles we've emitted 3,000 tons less carbon into the environment. We'll just have to continue working as hard on mending the damage we're doing to the planet as we are on creating excitement and change in schools around the world.
Happy New Year, fellow travellers, virtual or alongside us on Seat 53F.
Earlier this month I wrote in my GETideas blog about how in education we have a great talent for ignoring what the research out there says about what we know works in education, opting instead to largely continue with a status quo for which there is little supporting evidence of success at all. It's almost as if we strive for mediocrity in the face of proven excellence:
For example, formative assessment – student-initiated, self, and peer assessment – is far more effective at raising test scores than teaching to the test. Not putting any grades on student work at all, strictly limiting feedback solely to comments, is the most effective means of students eventually gaining top scores.
Go Google it and ye shall find.
Yet I haven’t heard one piece of discourse on formative assessment in the U.S. in 2011 that actually shows an understanding of what it is (the description is nearly always the precise opposite). And I do not know of any schools, anywhere, that have a policy that says that no student receives a grade until the examination (and I would love to be corrected on this).
Those making the decisions nearly always fall for the trap set for them: Our minds are built for ignoring the facts.
George Lakoff, the political strategist, sums this up most eloquently in the first chaper of his book, Don't Think of An Elephant (you just did, didn't you?):
When I teach the study of framing at [UC] Berkeley, in Cognitive Science 101, the first thing I do is I give my students an exercise. The exercise is: “Don’t think of an elephant! Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant.” I’ve never found a student who is able to do this. Every word, like elephant, evokes a frame, which can be an image or other kinds of knowledge: Elephants are large, have floppy ears and a trunk, are associated with circuses, and so on. The word is defined relative to that frame.
When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame. Richard Nixon found that out the hard way. While under pressure to resign during the Watergate scandal, Nixon addressed the nation on T.V. He stood before the nation and said, “I am not a crook.” And everybody thought about him as a crook.
You can read more about this notion of framing in my GETideas post.
Since writing this post, I've seen other examples of framing getting in the way of seeking out the facts that explain things, and of the facts not being as appealing as the frames through which people have already chosen to interpret an event. Really getting to understand how people frame seems key to helping move educators and education departments forward in adopting practices that the facts tell us work better than the status quo.
Take, for example, President John F Kennedy's assassination. This whole event, for large numbers of people, is framed, along with sadness, with the words "conspiracy theory". Thus, when The Umbrella Man was noticed on the street at the point of the assassination, despite the fact it was a beautiful day not requiring a black umbrella, people assumed that he was somehow part of the plot, providing many lavish explanations as to how so.
What emerged years later is a factual explanation and, as the author who coined the phrase The Umbrella Man puts it, a cautionary tale about frames:
View the whole clip, and explanation of The Umbrella Man with Errol Morris.
"A school where learning is all about making? It sounds lovely in principle - or in a newspaper editorial or keynote - but it'll never work in practice."
Sometimes you give a talk or write an article, and you really wonder if it was any good in achieving anything at all. In 2010 I had addressed a group of Creative Practitioners and teachers, all part of the wonderful Creative Partnerships programme that put 'creatives' (artists, musicians, filmmakers and so on) into schools to imbue their way of working throughout learning and teaching. It was here that I started to really push the notion of creativity as being inescapably about making. How can you be creative without making something: a written poem, a car, a rocket?
Well, I discovered nearly 18 months on that Sam Hirst and Emma Farrow, teachers at West Park Academy, Darlington, had taken this to heart, and embarked on a maker's curriculum of their own. As with my own Creative Partnerships project, it was seven year olds that showed us how it's done.
Sam and Emma have given me some of their story to share with you:
A combination of the age of students and their varied socio-economic backgrounds had united them in the wrong way: the level of support they required and the constant questions they asked and assurances they needed were halting their capacity to learn.
It felt like they had stopped thinking for themselves, they had become passive learners unwilling to take any risks. looking only for the teacher to tell them what to do or else not to participating, opting out by remaining stuck.
The challenge was to get them to figure things out for themselves take away the certainty that there was a right answer to build up an approach to learning that was an active process. We also wanted a legacy, that would change the way we as teachers did things and resulted in independent learners who were able to persevere, make connections, take risks and ask and answer their own questions.
We needed John, our creative practitioner, power tools and time to explore, construct, create, fail, try again and a belief that we could build anything.
We realised that if children where going to construct they needed to explore how things were made and put together.
On the first day When the children arrived at school they were confronted with lots of stuff, old TVs, computers, toasters and hairdryers and lots of real tools. A day was spent taking things apart to see how they worked Children worked collaboratively, they talked they explained they showed us what they knew they were excited, curious and determined to discover. They spent over two hours, all on task, enthralled with what they were doing. They attempted to explain to each other what the purpose of each component was. The teacher was the observer, listening in, getting a window into their thinking. The purpose was for children to have an understanding of how ever day objects worked and that you can work things out just through exploration.
We then looked at what they could they turn all these bits into? No direction, totally from their imagination. Free rein just to explore, to construct, the fun of making something without a defined end product. Success was in the doing, the playing around with materials to generate ideas, the persevering the creating, exploring what might be possible. We immediately saw in some children a flexibility of thought, an enthusiasm and tenacity that we had not seen before.
Through discussions with John, the children identified the skills in order for them to realise their ideas, to prevent them becoming frustrated, they needed further exposure to different tools, techniques and skills in order to satisfy the demands of their creations. This was when we brought in the power tools. There was a risk assessment to complete but beyond there was no further complications children could see that we trusted them to use these tools appropriately and they did not let us down. They were the right tools for the job.
As a result we got....runways, villages, planes, dragons, the list was endless and we also got enthusiasm and a love of the learning and acquisition of new skills
As we progressed we found gaps in their understanding in other subjects that could be addressed through to exposure to learning and experiences within the context of construction. What is the best way to bend an iron bar, how to measure accurately and why it is important. Which materials will allow an electric current to pass through and why we need to know? Through the doing, testing experimenting, questioning they learnt knowledge and skills in a context that could see a purpose for.
"When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way that it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money...
"That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact:
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build things that other people can use.
"Once you discover that, you'll never be the same again."
It's an oldie that I've only just unearthed. Nearly two years ago I spoke to 500 'creative agents', people from the creative industries working in schools, at their national conference in Birmingham on how to manage creativity in education.
And I just discovered the video on Vimeo.
This talk was one of the first 'biggies' that I gave after "coming back" to education after my time at Channel 4. One of the reasons I quite like it is that it led to one of the projects of which I am most proud: TEDxKids @ Sunderland.
It covers a few things: